I’m tired. I’m really tired. I think everyone is, and it’s not a great time for it. But that doesn’t wipe the crusty crap off my eyes. Because I won’t let it. I find it too satisfying to do myself.

I’m taking the blog posts off a regular schedule for now. I pretty much already did, but now it’s official. I feel like I just don’t have the time or energy to write “extra.” I’m under a ton of stress from the apocalyptic job market, the dystopian economy, and cataclysmic personal issues.

Well, the last one is a bit of an exaggeration. I still have an amazing partner. But I did recently have to move into a new home that’s a significant downgrade from my old place. It wasn’t a matter of cost, even—at least not directly. The roof on my previous home was falling apart, and to make a long story short, it wasn’t tenable to fix it. Moving always sucks, so that was its own burden. I lifted a bunch of shit I probably shouldn’t have, especially considering I’ve had a hernia in the past.

Professionally, things are looking… lateral? I’ve had a couple “promising” prospects turn to nothing, but I do have another on the horizon. A former team member is recommending me for a position that would provide regular income and stability. It’s rare that I have a referral, so hopefully that makes a difference. On the gig side of things, I’m actually in the midst of two projects. YGOPRODeck is willing to publish my upcoming retrospectives for the games in the Early Days Collection. There’s no hard schedule for those, so subscribe to this site if you want to be alerted. The articles will be exclusive to YGOPRODeck, but I will link to them from my site.

I’m also working on being published in a gaming magazine. I’ve found an interested client, and the process is ongoing. It’s an independent magazine that is run by someone with an unrelated full-time career, so it might be a few months before my writing materializes. It’s great to have the opportunity though, and I really like what I’ve read of the magazine. I would namedrop them, but I feel awkward about doing so when I still have no formal work agreement with them yet. As things solidify, or even if things don’t work out, I’ll share more info.

As for gaming, the EDC has utterly consumed my free time. I was originally focusing on beating the games in order, and to some extent I still am, but this got derailed when I discovered how much of a slog Duel Monsters 4 was. My process was usually to get to the ending of a game, focus on the next one, and return to the previous ones for some amount of time each day to work on a complete card collection. While this has mostly been enjoyable, it is a maddening task for someone such as myself when in its final steps. I refuse to use guides unless I’m completely stumped, and finding specific cards when you don’t know which pack or character drops them can be agonizing. The random nature of it all means you don’t even necessarily know if you’ve seen every card that can drop from one pool. I’m still doing it though. I haven’t really touched the spinoffs yet, for the record.

I watched the third season of Invincible. It was excellent. I am starting to become concerned about the series’ potential length. It’s starting to show signs that it might be artificially extending its storyline to commission more episodes from Amazon. Every time a character’s arc seems dealt with, five more pop up. Hopefully I’m wrong and it all builds to something, but I’m at the very least annoyed with characters surviving brutal onslaughts. How can we believe in the stakes of a fight when the writers show a willingness to undo them?

I’m on Blue Sky a lot. Follow me on there if you haven’t already, as I spout nonsense more regularly there than I do here. I’ve had some lovely interactions with the userbase, as well. The author of the upcoming Captain Planet comic book reboot had a conversation with me about the importance of optimistic media and when darker themes may or may not have their place. It was great. Seeing that a sincere, passionate creator is behind this endeavor made me interested in checking the series out. My thanks to David Pepose for the interaction, and I recommend everyone look into his Captain Planet comic book to see if it interests you.

I want to talk about the site a bit. It hasn’t seen many upgrades lately. That’s mainly because my time has been spent elsewhere. Part of it is because my efforts to reach a wider audience have been stomped on. This is a little complicated to explain for anyone who hasn’t maintained a website, but essentially I’m having issues with Google not indexing some of my site’s pages.

This came to a head after I published my review for the EDC. I really pushed myself to have it out not long after the game released, as it would have less competition in search algorithms and potentially drive the most traffic to my site yet. Weeks later, I learned that the article was never indexed. This means it could not be found from a Google search. It’s been over a month since the EDC released, and I’ve lost god knows how many views from it never going live on Google.

Why? I’ll be honest with you: there appears to be no valid reason. Google has my sitemap, and it should be regularly crawling my site for new pages to index. That behavior is why I didn’t bother seeing if my EDC review was indexed from the beginning, as my pages typically are. When indexing fails, Google tries to provide a reason as to why. The reason for that page is “crawled, but not indexed” which seems to be Google’s miscellaneous category they use when they have no excuse for a page not being indexed.

Looking into that reason, possible explanations are provided, but none apply. Low-quality content? No, it’s in fact some of the only high-quality content out there. Page deemed unimportant due to a lack of internal site linking? It’s linked in my automatic category queues, which is the bare minimum other hosted pages on my site meet. Another reason they provide is that Google’s crawler determined that it would overload my site by attempting to index it. That’s total bullshit. That would be a sitewide issue, which this isn’t. Also, I’ve had plug-ins and apps ping my site hundreds of times in a single day. It never goes down.

I reached out to Google support, but as some of you might imagine, it’s a joke. No response after weeks. My site isn’t the domain for a major corporation, so they don’t give a shit if my content is cannibalized. There’s probably two human beings left even supervising the support section. Hell, even assuming it’s human beings might be too generous.

So yeah, I dunno. I don’t fucking know. I’ve asked my site host’s support team for help, but they haven’t responded yet. I’m not worried that they won’t though, as they’ve been extremely helpful in the past. I’m more worried that they will have no power or insight to fix it. For lack of a better idea, I thought I would try internally linking to that review more, which was what incentivized this entire blog post. So here’s some links, you greedy gluttonous Google goblin. Piss off. I put in so much work for that article, only for Google to deem it irrelevant based on criteria that not even they themselves seem to understand. It’s done a lot to hamper my spirits when writing, as they have essentially cut off my path of organic growth.

Before I jump off of this issue, I’d like to add that it’s not a matter of impatience on my part, either. I tested this. I imported several new music reviews last week, and I immediately checked their indexing status. They all were unindexed. Perfectly fine. It’s not like the crawler is running every second. I then manually request indexing, as I have done a dozen times for my EDC review. I wait a scant few minutes, refresh, and there it is. The new pages are indexed with no problem, while my post from over a month ago is stuck in limbo.

Is there a conspiracy? Is Google not indexing small sites like mine so that larger publications have no competition? Maybe for a new product, all smaller domains discussing that product aren’t indexed until some certain length of time has passed after the larger sites have swallowed the majority of traffic. I don’t actually believe that’s what’s happening, but it’s an explanation in the face of no fucking alternative one.

So, yeah. I’m annoyed. But I still write. I write because I’m annoyed. I don’t write because I’m annoyed. I have, at any given moment, hundreds of drafted pieces that will someday see the light of day (though not if Google can help it). Things are coming. Things will always be coming until I am dead. And I refuse to go down without a fight. Anyway, I think I’m going to go cook a frozen pizza. It’s not even Red Baron. What do you think I am? A king?